Vic Chesnutt – North Star Deserter

Vic Chesnutt has always had a good ear for collaborators, from Michael Stipe to Bill Frisell. North Star Deserter finds him in Montreal working with his most unlikely crew of players yet: Punk scenester/photographer Jem Cohen arranged sessions involving members of disparate groups including Fugazi and Godspeed You Black Emperor.

What comes out this mix is the most humorless album Chesnutt has ever made. Recorded live to tape (check out that hiss), the album is preciously threadbare, the backdrop a baroque haze. Chesnutt’s literary gifts are such that his most obtuse lyrics sound simply ordered, their mystery meticulously arranged. Couple that with his gentle vocal delivery and his songs become unassuming but also strangely unsettling.

These players work only at the latter. Sheets of guitar distortion and field recordings, launched during long pauses in which Chesnutt disappears, jam up many of the songs. In fact, on the eight-plus minutes each of “Splendid” and “Debriefing”, Chesnutt is hardly a factor amid the business-as-usual studio histrionics. Elsewhere, on “You Are Not Alone” and “Glossolalia”, a vocal choir chimes in to provide ironic shadowing of Chesnutt’s humble voice.

North Star Deserter shines best when the spookhouse tension translates more to creaky strings, trembling fiddle and string-bass thuds. The broken soul of songs such as “Over” (“Everything blows away someday/Everything turns to dust/Big ol’ mountains do/As well as every one of us”) and “Fodder On Her Wings”, a Nina Simone cover, is louder than any amp could allow, anyway.